


Bulletins from Bedlam

by thebasement_archivist



Category: The X-Files
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1999-12-31
Updated: 1999-12-31
Packaged: 2018-11-20 06:52:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11330721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebasement_archivist/pseuds/thebasement_archivist
Summary: Note from alice ttlg, the archivist: this story was originally archived atThe Basement, which moved to the AO3 to ensure the stories are always available and so that authors may have complete control of their own works. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in June 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address onThe Basement's collection profile.





	Bulletins from Bedlam

**Author's Note:**

> Note from alice ttlg, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [The Basement](http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Basement), which moved to the AO3 to ensure the stories are always available and so that authors may have complete control of their own works. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in June 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [The Basement's collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/thebasement/profile).

 

Bulletins from Bedlam by Jessica Harris

Bulletins from Bedlam  
by Jessica Harris 

Disclaimer: I'm playing with Chris Carter's toys.  
Rating: NC-17  
Feedback: As always, cravenly sought after. [   
Website: ](mailto:)[http://avalon.net/~nonie/jharris/jhindex.html ](http://avalon.net/~nonie/jharris/jhindex.html)

Thanks to Spike and Quercus and Nonie for help and encouragement and all sorts of good stuff. There will be two more scenes some day when my carpal tunnels let me type again. 

* * *

============================================  
Bulletins from Bedlam  
Jessica Harris  
26/06/99  
============================================ 

I. Black rain  
================ 

Black rain. A blue-steel shimmer on oily pavement. Distant restless noises and the hardest edges of night pressing in on him. 

A starless night, low storm-clouds overhead, but it doesn't matter - Mulder doesn't look at the stars much anymore. When he does he grows dizzy, the world spins to pieces around him. The stars have come too close; they promise a future that he's given up his own to prevent. 

It's all gone now, badge, bureau, career, and with them, he's beginning to fear, his mind. He's become one of his own phantoms, a shrill panicked voice on the phone, anonymous scribbles in the mail as he tries to persuade someone, anyone, to believe what he *knows* to be true. The world is being told that the aliens are their allies, but Mulder has seen the shape of a larger plan that wakes him screaming in the night. Slaves. No, *cattle*. That's their fate if they keep to this course. 

Black rain and loneliness. Even Scully's gone, she couldn't follow him this time, and he shouldn't really blame her, though he does. She had never wanted to believe, and she still had something to lose, her family, the work a doctor still could do. 

He has only this, the battle that no one sees being fought. Without it he's nothing, he negates himself, a psychologist who's lost his mind, an agent of the state gone outlaw, rogue. This is all he has, this battle, this and a pale-faced monster who sells him secrets. 

No, *gives* him secrets. It's been a while since money changed hands for what Krycek brings him. They're in some kind of holding pattern now, circling each other cautiously, something building between them that he stops himself from examining too closely. He wonders what price he will eventually pay. For he's certain there will be a price. 

A familiar alleyway. Krycek should be waiting here. And he is, though this is not quite what Mulder expected. Krycek leans against the damp brick wall, pants around his knees, his cock in the mouth of a brush-cut man who kneels before him. Krycek's face is flushed and shiny-wet with rain, lips parted, pupils dilated, but he meets Mulder's gaze squarely and calmly. 

And oh the sudden fire in Mulder's own veins. He can't tear his eyes away, and Krycek's eyes glint briefly with triumph, his wet open mouth curving into a mocking smile. Then he shudders, grunts softly, his eyes flutter shut. The man at his feet starts to rise, and Krycek, without opening his eyes, grabs him by the collar, yanks him up, kisses him. When he lets go, the man reels backwards unsteadily. Krycek's lips are slick and milky, and he licks them consideringly as he opens his eyes. The third man looks at Krycek, looks at Mulder, looks back at Krycek questioningly. Krycek just jerks his head towards the street, and the man leaves, pushing Mulder out of his way as he does. Mulder slumps against the wall without resistance. 

When Mulder looks in the mirror these days the face that looks back at him is one he'd cross the street to avoid. His eyes are fixed and sunken, his features tight with too-much-effort, with trying-too-hard to look normal. He has to watch himself carefully, or his growing urgency and fear make his voice shrill and incoherent, contort his face in exaggerated Kabuki grimaces. 

Crazy face, and he's grown so gaunt he can count his ribs. *Does* count his ribs, repeatedly, compulsively, one arm folded across his chest and fingers dancing down his own side, 4-5-6-7-8, 4-5-6-7-8, as if to assure himself that his own container still holds steady. When he notices it he stuffs his hand deep in his pocket and tries to keep it prisoner there, but even so all his shirts are developing a grubby smear down one side that won't quite wash out. It frightens him. He's been told that the mad don't know they're mad, and he wonders if it's a paradoxical proof of his own sanity, his growing conviction that he's *lost* it. It feels like a darkness has settled at the base of his skull, and sometimes it unfurls in tendrils up through his brain and then he can't quite *remember* - how did he get here? what does he think he's doing? why does any of it matter? At those times he stays home and lies motionless for hours on the couch, curled into a ball, hands squeezed tight between his thighs. 

He can't think what Krycek wants with him in this state, though it seems that he does. Want him, that is. His cues have not exactly been subtle. Last time, Mulder heard the sound of a zipper as he entered the ally, and when he came around the dumpster Krycek was pissing, standing in the thin beam of light from a window, handling his own cock showily, caressingly. 

Mulder didn't react then and he's determined not to react now. Krycek's pants are still open, and his cock is shrinking and wet against his thigh, absurdly deflated, but Mulder still feels vaguely menaced. "See something you like, Mulder?" Krycek smirks. 

Mulder just blinks the eyes in his lunatic's mask and pulls himself away from the wall. He's sure that the erection tenting his pants is obvious, but he waits quietly for the other man to go on. This has always been there between him, and there's nothing to stop him now, no bureau rules to prevent him from reaching out and taking what's on offer. But some fragile last thing - the thought of his old life, of Scully, of his own tattered principles - makes him keep his distance from Krycek, from his corrupt boyish face and apparent willingness to watch the human race drift passively towards damnation. 

Now Krycek shrugs and does up his pants. "You still in there, Mulder? Anyone home? You wanna hear a secret?" A toothy little boy smile. Mulder holds out the envelope of cash, but as-has-become-usual, Krycek shakes his head no. Then, and this is new, he reaches out and curls his fist around Mulder's hand, squeezes it shut until the edges of the money dig into his palm. Mulder bites his own tongue at the touch, a sudden iron blossom in his mouth. 

"Next time," says Krycek softly. "Next time we'll settle your tab." 

Mulder wonders how this makes him feel. Somewhere deep below the surface he senses a distant agitation, disgust or fear or excitement, he's not sure which. He ignores it. If he started listening to such messages now, he'd be lost.  
  


II. Still in There  
===================== 

Mulder looks like shit. He looks like his own death mask. It looks like death *hurt*. Word is that he's lost it, but they've always said that, and only now, looking at him, do I start to believe it. He's staring at me, and though his face hasn't changed, his pants have gotten tight. Carl's going to be pissed when I get home tonight. All I told him was that we had to stage a little scene, lay some bait - I didn't tell him it would be Mulder. He doesn't trust my fascination with Mulder, and won't appreciate having been made to perform for his benefit. 

I don't care. I don't trust it myself, don't understand it, can't move past it, this strange tight *focus* on Mulder, even now. 

Him and his goddam hero complex, his need to save the world. I don't get it. I mean, christ, look at him, the world cut him loose a long time ago, the world wants nothing to do with him. "Cattle!" he raved at me the first time I sold him information. "We're nothing but animals to them!" 

Well, what makes him think we're anything else? Animals. Stupid, heedless, vicious. I'd gladly let the aliens take most people. Me, all I'm trying to do is save my own sorry ass. 

But then he's not me, and maybe that's why, why he has this effect on me, why I can't tear my eyes away when he's around. He makes me furious, he's like a mental tooth-ache, like a thorn in my flesh. I can't let it be, can't leave him alone, can't - it makes me so angry, the way he refuses to *see* - I want to tell him not to be so fucking stupid, to save himself like the rest of us. No one will love him for pointing out how stupid and blind they've all been. Oh, he might end up a hero in the history books, but more likely he'll end up dead, and it's just not worth it. 

Not that he'd believe me. Or even hear me. It makes me want to shake him, shake the thought into him, shake him until he *listens*, until he *looks* at me, until - 

I dream about him, you know. All the fucking time. I wake up tense and raw and hard and turn to Carl until he flips me over and yanks my hips up and almost makes me forget. 

Almost. 

"See something you like, Mulder?" I say now, baiting him, but he just keeps standing there like a zombie. That last look Carl shot me was incredulous as much as angry. I could almost hear him - "*That's* Mulder? *That's* who you pretend my cock's attached to? That shuffling alley-ghost?" 

Mulder still hasn't moved, and I zip up and sigh. 'You still in there, Mulder? Wanna hear a secret?" 

At the mention of secrets he steps forward. Why do I torture him like this? I can't help myself, he keeps coming back for more, he just won't *learn*. They're real enough, the secrets I give him, but they won't help him. Doesn't he realise that that no one is listening to him anymore? 

But his face brightens a little and he holds out an envelope. From the looks of its dirt and folds, it's the same one that he's brought to our last few meetings. I wonder if there's actually anything left in it. I wonder how crazy he really is. I reach out and squeeze his hand shut around it, and he looks like he might throw up. 

"Next time," I promise him. 'Next time we'll settle your tab." 

His fingers dance over and over the edges of the envelope as I slip away.  
  


III. Men With Guns  
================== 

Some day a little assassin will sit at my knee and sweetly lisp up at me, "Daddy Alex? How did you and Daddy Fox fall in love?" 

"Men with guns," I'll say to her, with a warm nostalgic smile. "Men with guns brought us together at last." 

They were waiting for us at the next meet. Teach me to think with my dick. I was so busy with my plans that I didn't even notice the still black shapes poised along the roof-tops. They waited until we were only a few feet apart, and then they opened fire. Lucky it was that alley - I had almost forgotten my original reason for choosing it. They didn't know about the hatch down into the maintenance tunnels beneath the warehouse, and when they started firing I yanked it open and pushed Mulder down it. Pain exploded in my arm as I followed him, but I slammed the metal door down and got it bolted, and we were OK. Except for my arm. I checked it out quickly - small entry wound, big nasty exit wound, too much blood. 

My arm, and the screaming. Mulder was screaming, high, loud, crazy. I'd forgotten he had a thing about bugs, and when I clicked on my flashlight I saw the tunnel was crawling with roaches, dozens of them scuttling around Mulder where he lay curled on the floor. Screaming, like I mentioned. I guess he was closer to the edge than I had realised. I yanked him to his feet and brushed him off, but he didn't stop, so I stuffed one of my gloves in his mouth and pulled him along behind me. The hatch would hold them for a while, but not forever. 

Something happened to him down there, I don't know what exactly. I only remember snatches of it myself - trying to keep my grip on Mulder's arm, trying not to get lost in the winding tunnels. My head floating lighter and lighter above my shoulders. A bare tiled room, Mulder half-naked and his hands smeared with blood. And then his eyes, his eyes *changing*. His lips pressed to my temple. Darkness. 

And when I awoke, I was in my own bed, and Mulder was cuffed there beside me, Carl glowering at us both from a chair in the corner. Not much of a honeymoon, when you think about it, but one way or another we've been together ever since.  
  


IV. Bleeding  
============ 

Mulder licks rhythmically at the inside of his own mouth and wonders if they're in hell. It *feels* like hell, these endless winding tunnels with their dim red emergency lights, the scalding hiss of the steam pipes, the memory of bugs on his skin, bugs *under* it, in places he knows they can't be. They've been running for what feels like hours, but it all looks the same to him, and it's too easy to imagine that this is eternity, that he will never get out. 

So he tries not to think, and licks at his own mouth, tasting leather, blood, a faint sweet-salt taste that he imagines is Krycek's skin. He spat the glove out a few corridors back, and now he concentrates carefully on this taste, its complexities and nuances. It helps keep the screaming at bay, the horrified crawl of his flesh. 

The other thing that helps, he realises, is the grip that Krycek has on his arm. His hand is warm, which somehow surprises Mulder. And the warmth seems to flow out into his arm, calming him. He had never thought that the touch of a monster could be so - soothing. 

Though it occurs to him now that no-one watching would pick Krycek as the monster. He himself is the one with the shattered Kabuki face, the dancing spider hand, the one hunched and shaking and wracked with animal screams. He feels a laugh rising at the thought, and but it's too close from there back to screams, and he swallows it. Concentrates on the warm grip in his arm. The warmth, he realises, is not all in his mind - his arm is wet and slick and slightly sticky. Blood. And their pace has slowed, Krycek is stumbling. Gunshots. There were gunshots. Krycek is bleeding. 

"Bleeding," he says "you're bleeding." 

Krycek snorts. 'I've been shot. Of course I'm fucking bleeding." 

Mulder's mind flickers frantically around the concept. His mind seems to be acting strangely, won't follow the thought, won't settle, won't hold still. With a lurch of panic it comes to him that without Krycek he'd be trapped down here alone. "Wait, wait, stop," he says. "We have to do something, you're losing too much blood. 

Krycek snorts again, but a few moments later he tugs Mulder down a side corridor and through a door that shuts behind them with a clang. Darkness descends and Krycek's grip falls away and Mulder feels the screams threaten again, but then a dusty fluorescent strip flickers to life. 

There's more blood than he could have imagined. Krycek's shirt is soaked with it and his face is pale and sweating. Mulder strips jacket and shirt from him, fashions bandages as best he can, tearing strips from Krycek's shirt and then his own. Krycek slumps in against his chest and it feels oddly inevitable, the blood-oiled glide of their skins together. In this moment Mulder realises that his old life is gone forever. He's been holding onto the thought that some day this will all be over and he can go back, but now he knows that it will never be over, that this is his universe now -blood and flickering subterranean light, the slide of their bodies together in pain and loss and weakness and succour, in Krycek's fading consciousness and his own rising hunger. Mulder's head hurts, he's dizzy, his cock is shamefully hard, but it feels right, this is what it *should* feel like to love a monster, and some last thing falls to fragments inside of him. He can't remember now what held him back from this. 

He brushes his lips across Krycek's temple, licks the beads of sweat from Krycek's upper lip. 

Krycek stares at him and says hoarsely, "If I'd known it would have this effect on you, I'd have had myself shot months ago." 

Krycek's blood is hot but his body is cold and his breathing rapid, and Mulder realises how close to unconsciousness he really is. "Mulder," gasps Krycek now, "red button on my cell-phone. Hit it twice, my people will come find us. 

Mulder does so, then eases Krycek's jacket back onto him, leather over bandages and naked shivering flesh. Krycek mutters something he can't quite make out, and Mulder touches his lips, leaving them smeared red. "Pretty," he hears himself say hollowly. 

"Mulder," croaks Krycek. "You're a fucking mental case, anyone ever tell you that?" Then his eyelids flicker shut. Mulder pulls the limp body into his lap, wraps his arms around him, keeping him warm. He feels oddly peaceful. Sleepy. 

When he wakes up, men stand over them, peering down. The man from last time in the alley leans down to pull Krycek from his arms, and Mulder feels the screaming start again.  
  


V. Smoke  
======== 

The men behind Mulder choke and gag at the burnt-flesh reek of the smoke that billows around them, but Mulder is calm. Concentrated. Utterly focussed. No one else has gotten this far into the burning zone before, and rubble and blackened bodies are piled high beneath their feet. If they could see through the smoke, what's left of the city would still be visible, but here in the midst of it it feels like the devastation is boundless. And somewhere before them sits their target, the impossible bulk of the alien mothership. 

A soot-grimed skull slides precariously beneath Mulder's next step, and he casually kicks it away. It rolls twice, then shatters against a chunk of masonry. His team is tense and unspeaking behind him. They volunteered for this, but he can tell he makes them nervous. 

He doesn't mean to spook them. It's just that he's learned the secrets of negotiating such landscapes, learned to step sideways in his mind from their horrors. Such places always reveal some task that needs to be done, and if he focuses on that, it stops him from looking too close, from thinking too hard. He's frightened - these days, it seems, he's always frightened - but his fear lives at a dislocated distance from where he crouches in the rubble, and if he can keep it that way this might all still vanish, Alex might still shake him awake in the home they've somehow come to share. It wouldn't be the first time. 

Though right now Alex seems to be here beside him, his eyes bloodshot in his blackened face. Mulder reaches out and touches him curiously, assessingly, touches his face, his wrist, the small of his back. The team shifts a little, uncomfortable, and Mulder pulls his attention away. He raises the binoculars to his eyes. He can't say what sign he's waiting for, but he'll know it when it comes.  
  


VI. Home  
======== 

Call me a sentimental fool, but I love him this way. Face smudged, clothes torn and dirty, eyes that make the rest of the team step back when he looks at them. They're scared, hell, *I'm* scared, and I bet we'll all be smelling this greasy pork-fat smoke for the rest of our lives, but when Mulder raises the binoculars his hands are perfectly steady, and I feel my heart turn over in my chest. All his pain and paralysis lifts in these moments of focus, all his doubt and fear and shame forgotten. He doesn't have the crematorium jitters this place gives the rest of us - I suspect that what we're looking at doesn't hold a fucking *candle* to some of the places he's been inside his head, in the nightmares I've had to slap him awake from. 

You know, I think it almost *helps* to have his nightmares come to life. At least it puts him in a world he recognises, whose language he speaks and understands. He's been able to deal with what's happened here in a way that no one else has, it doesn't faze him that the impossible has happened, that the whole *world* has gone crazy. When all this is over I'll have to start putting him back together again, but for now his fractured mind might just get us out of this alive. 

Now he sees something the rest of us can't, and signals to our gunner. We don't even know if this thing will work - it cut through the scraps of the alien ship that crashed, but it hasn't been tried against a full-functioning vessel. Silently they set up the mechanism, its barrel pointing at something that Mulder silently indicates in the scope. Then they prime it and we run for cover. It seems a long time before we hear the hiss and buzz of the weapon, and longer still before a great wave of flame rises from the ship. 

The air itself seems to pick me up and tumble me end over end until I'm dropped painfully to the ground. Mulder lands on top of me and I roll us over into the shelter of a wall, covering his body with my own. This kind of gesture comes to me with alarming ease now. I'm glad there's no one else here to see. It's enough to ruin my reputation. 

We lie there until the rain of shrapnel stops. He's very still beneath me and an icicle of panic begins to form in my stomach. I raise myself a little and look down at him. His eyes are closed, but he's breathing, and gently I shake him. He opens his eyes, blinking blankly at the rubble around us. Then he rubs his eyelids with his fists like a child, and says to me hesitantly "this isn't our home - is it?" 

I grab him in my arms and hold him tight. My face feels weird, and I realise I'm grinning uncontrollably. "Not any more, Mulder," I say to him. "Not any more." 

He settles into the circle of my arms, and we watch the ship burn.  
  


VII. Waking the Neighbours  
========================== 

Mulder's fucking me when his cell-phone rings. He stops, his weight resting on my back, and picks it up, dutiful to the last. It's Scully, I can hear her voice. The Bureau's given him some kind of cushy consultant's job, guilt money that pays for this apartment that's too big and too plush for either one of us. Scully is his liaison with the Bureau, and, he'd still say, his friend. I'll give her some credit, she did keep in touch, even at his lowest, tried to make sure he ate and slept and didn't swallow his gun some long dark night. 

But I'll never forgive the pity that crept into her voice, the pity that's still in her eyes when she looks at him. 

"It's a tragedy, the ruin of such a fine mind," said one of the ADs to her the other day, and she sighed and agreed with him. Bitch. I wonder if she knows I still have her phone tapped. 

One thing's true, he'll never be the same. You don't go through what we did and just bounce back. Even now sometimes his eyes go pale and glassy with fright and confusion, or he'll say something that doesn't quite make sense, doesn't exactly *connect*. It makes Scully wince, but in a strange way I like it. My sensibilities have always been a little gothic - I can appreciate a ruin in a way Scully never could. They're much more interesting than perfection. The world has become a safe and predictable place, and life with Mulder is neither. 

I walked into the bathroom the other night to find him standing in front of the mirror looking down at a handful of his pills. I didn't stop to ask questions, just lunged forward and smacked them out of his hand, sending him stumbling sideways. They scattered everywhere, clattering like tiny hailstones. 

Automatically he swung around, fist connecting squarely with my nose before he registered who it was. "What the fuck are you doing?" he shouted. 

And then he saw my face. "Oh," he said "Oh. You thought I - " and I grabbed him and buried my face in his neck, worked my hands up under his shirt to stroke the skin on his back. "Oh Alex," he said, and his voice was calm and sad. "I dropped the bottle, that's all - I just dropped the bottle, and had to pick them up. Try to trust me a little, OK?" 

And that had me bawling like a fucking baby, standing in my shorts in the bathroom, but I raised my head and looked him in the eye and said: 

"I'll kill them all, you know. If you ever hurt yourself, I'll go after every single one of them. You know that, don't you?" 

He nodded soberly, reached out, and wiped away the blood that was starting to drip from my nose. He cried a little too, then. And that's not something he does much, not even now. 

And I'd do it, you know. All of them. All the people who planted this pain in his eyes. Oh, most of the conspirators are dead already, but they're not the ones I really blame. I'd go after the people who said they were his friends and then deserted him, who said they loved him and left, the people who laugh at him even now, who pity the tremor in his hands, the look in his eyes. All of them. Even Skinner. Even Scully. 

And then myself. I've hurt him as much as they have. And besides, without him, there's not much point to my staying here. There's no room for us left in the world we helped to save. Sometimes I wonder why we bothered. We bought them back their perfect little world, we paid with great bleeding chunks of ourselves, but all they see when they look at us is trash, a crippled cocksucker and his crazy boyfriend. He's all I've got left. 

But it's not all bad. I woke one night from some godawful charnel dream to find him *licking* me - not in a sexual way, just smooth soothing regular strokes laid down across my shoulder. His face was concentrated, his eyes flat and yellow like some big strange cat's. 

"Mulder?" I asked cautiously. "What are you doing?" 

He blinked at me, frowned a little. "You were having a nightmare," he said, "So I had to -" and he waved his hand casually, as if the answer was so obvious he didn't need to explain it. 

So I just nodded, kissed him, and went back to sleep. And you know what? I slept remarkably well the rest of that night. Scully never did understand the art of making your own rules. 

Now I twist around and shout up into the phone "Call back later, Scully, when he doesn't have his cock up my ass." 

"Alex!" yelps Mulder, but she's gone, and I move back against him and ... 

... and everything almost makes sense again in the midst of this, this stretch and gasp and burn, this ache and thrust and slow dissolve to pleasure. Me with my ass in the air and giving it up, crying it out for all to hear, all the neighbours who glare in the hallway, who get off the elevator when we get on. They have no idea how much they owe us. 

"Harder," I moan at Mulder, "harder!" and with shameless cries he pounds into me and I shout it out as loud as I can Oh*fuck*yes. Oh. Fuck. Yes. 

I hope it shocks the neighbours from their smug little dreams. I hope it corrupts their perfect children. 

I never thought I'd miss the war.  
  


=================================  
  
  



End file.
